Technically it is not a Discovery of the Indies-type of deal, this, as Edwin already pointed out, is a breathless FPS. Nova Echo Point when the demo came out. The full game has just come out, and as someone with so much experience Fall of the Titan I take back that I'll ingest anything with a decent wallrun, I bought it, I played it, and I'm here to tell you why it's great.
Set atop a vast, free-roaming area of floating islands, Echo Point Nova does as good a job as any game of recreating the feel of TF’s agile yet intuitive parkour. Wall-running, double-jumping, and grappling are all basically 1:1 matches. But it goes much further in terms of speed and scale, letting you launch yourself across vast chasms of shattered stone and traverse arenas much faster than enemies could hope to track you.
(The most fantastic environment and the ability to perform frictionless, chained slides are also reminiscent of Tribesthat other moving shot series that James likes but is essentially dead. No, are crying.)
The gunplay itself is decent enough. The guns are oddly understated in design but fire with a satisfying click, and the enemy quickly escalates from useless leg-using losers to flying gunners and guys on the same kind of hoverboard that powers your own movements. Still, traversal is always the star of any encounter. Moving slowly is suicide and running on the ground is accidental death at best, so fights are won by buzzing around like an angry hornet snowboarding. Dive in quickly, shoot a mercenary mid-slide, grab onto a tree to quickly change course, blow up another one, jump off a fallen pillar, launch a giant mech as you fly over it, pick up so much speed on landing that you run over the guy next to you to death, that sort of thing.
Obviously there is no shortage of fast-paced shooters, and since we're already in a streak of comparisons, there are touches of modernity. Condemn and Ultramatar In the way that killing enemies causes you to lose the health and ammo you need to keep up the carnage. Still, the size and pace of Echo Point Nova’s aerial gunfights make it feel distinct, as does its sprawling open-world structure. If there’s some kind of gate or railroad here, I haven’t seen it, so once the tutorial is done kitting you out, there’s nothing stopping you from rocketing off to explore at 200km/h.
This is also a pleasure in itself, with or without weapons. You're heavy enough to feel like a real object, but light and agile enough to easily maintain momentum through chains of jumps, runs, and grabs. Leaping from platform to platform with clean sweep is thus a tactile pleasure. I've sometimes found myself surfing around just to cool off after a tough battle, though from what I've played so far, even the “Challenging” rated bursts of combat don't make me sweat excessively.
That’s partly due to the inherent ridiculousness of your hoverboard-riding fighting style, and partly because when it comes to the bad guys, Echo Point Nova has a sense of humor. The guys in the air look like Moore-era James Bond henchmen, complete with exaggerated, hilariously flailing movements when they’re shot down, and when some of the ground forces deploy jump pads to get some air, their flight arc is accompanied by a cartoonish dive-bomber sound. Lesser enemies can also step on these pads by mistake, propelling the unsuspecting moron skyward and replacing that sound effect with a garbled scream.
I'm not as enthused by the thin story as I am by the occasional glitches and glitches (more than once my perspective has randomly rotated 90 degrees, which is not the kind of weird movement I had in mind). But overall, Echo Point Nova is proving to be a very fun time. Now available on Steamwith a 10% launch discount.
Leave feedback about this